This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, January 6, 2026
Looking forward in 2026, I can predict with confidence that nothing will change at the CBC, and demands from private sector news organizations for even greater dependence on the federal government will intensify.
Broadcasters, already distraught that they remain excluded from 2019’s “temporary” five-year Journalism Labour Tax Credit worth almost $30,000 annually per newsroom worker, are desperate for cash. Both TV and radio are in terminal decline, and, rather than reduce its insistence that over-the-air entities flood the market with news, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is looking for ways to make others (ultimately you) pay for newsrooms.
The plan has been for the CRTC to add more news funding to its repertoire by forcing foreign streamers to contribute a percentage of their Canadian revenues. No doubt considered devilishly clever when first conceived, the concept is under challenge in court by streamers, who also have the option of discontinuing services in Canada should they find the regulatory structure intolerable.
The U.S. is making matters worse for all involved by demanding in trade talks that Canada ditch the Online Streaming Act. When that happens—and it’s very possible it will—the lifeline the act represents for broadcast news (other than the CBC, of course) will no longer exist.
So, bereft of new ideas and denied what lobbyists used to call “money from web giants,” broadcasters will continue to gut their newsrooms while insisting the government take responsibility for funding their increasingly apparitional structures.
More layoffs will occur, and, before the year is out, Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller will join Prime Minister Mark Carney in granting broadcasters access to tax credits and subsidies for which they currently don’t qualify. This will come at a cost to the Treasury of somewhere north of $100 million.
Meanwhile, the CRTC’s investment-crushing inability to get anything done on time will continue. The subsidies will make it increasingly difficult to compete for those few remaining holdouts that refuse to be in the debt of the politically powerful. As a result, at least one independent innovator will opt to become subsidized, and at least two others will fold.
While all this is going on, nothing will change at the CBC. One year after Marie-Philippe Bouchard’s ascension to its presidency, there is no evidence of reform—a void that suggests the Mother Corp is satisfied with the manner in which it is conducting itself. The closest it has come to becoming more relevant to Canada’s West, for instance, has been to supplement its At Issue panel from time to time with CBC Calgary’s Jason Markusoff. He is well-informed and not unpleasant, but his Overton Window is extremely similar to that of the existing panelists, Althia Raj, Andrew Coyne, and Chantal Hebert.
This indicates the CBC has, despite the near-death experience it was contemplating at this time a year ago, opted to alter nothing in the first year of Bouchard’s term, and that we can expect more—a lot more—of the same in 2026 and in the years to come.
That’s because the CBC just received an additional $150 million on top of the $1.4 billion it had previously been allocated by Parliament. It will use some of that money to hire more reporters—often the best of those working for its private sector competitors—and continue to expand its dominance within the industry’s current ecosystem.
That sector, in response, will increase its demand that the federal government direct 25 percent of its advertising buys to platforms it has approved as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations (QCJO). Should broadcasters succeed in gaining that status, expect the ask to grow to 50 percent.
That will result in another $50-$60 million in federal subsidies to news media, of which the government approves.
Very little, if any, of this will be reported in the mainstream/legacy press. That will ensure that people who might be alarmed by the media’s increasingly close relationship with the government never learn anything about it.
As people learn of it, however, their distrust of those media organizations that depend on the good graces of government will continue to grow.
Thus, Canada’s news industry stays on course towards a three-tiered news industry. One will be an increasingly well-funded and dominant CBC. Another will be composed primarily of heavily subsidized but skeletal licensed and legacy media.
The third will consist of small, independent startups that mostly eschew or are disqualified from receiving government support. Consumers will be more inclined to trust them, but if they wish to grow, they will eventually realize that they cannot do so and remain competitive unless they, too, avail themselves of government subsidies. When they do, they will try to minimize the extent to which their readers are aware of that decision.
And that’s what you can expect to not be told about in 2026 by organizations that insist they must be subsidized to ensure you are well-informed and that democracy is preserved.
Enjoy 2026.
Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, and a former vice chair of the CRTC
